


Late Night Philosophy Lessons

by nightwalker



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, M/M, Post-Series, Post-War, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-05
Updated: 2014-01-05
Packaged: 2018-01-07 12:24:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightwalker/pseuds/nightwalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And like that I could see it. Erek’s real reason for being there. The real reason he’d tracked me down across the country and knocked on my door in the middle of the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Late Night Philosophy Lessons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [askmynameismarco](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=askmynameismarco).



> Warning: This story deals with the aftermath of the series and as such refers to the canon death of a main character and the violence and fallout of the Yeerk invasion.
> 
> This was written for Tumblr's Animorphs Christmas in July. My recipient was Askmynameismarco who asked for Marco/Erek, bloody conflict and self doubt, post-war angst.

Sometimes you think you’ve got it all under control – maybe for the first time in your entire life – and that you’re coasting. You know that feeling? You’ve got the cruise control on and the radio’s blaring, there’s wind in your hair. And then BAM.

Bugs in your teeth.

Hi. My name is Marco. But you already knew that. I am famous, after all. Everybody knows my name. It’s like Cheers, only without quite so many old white guys sitting around getting drunk.

And I really did feel like I was golden. My life, post-war, was going pretty well. I was rich, I was famous, I had a gig lined up that was going to let me practice my craft and get paid at the same time, I had my folks and my friends and if the nightmares kept me up some nights, well. That’s what video games were made for.

Ironically, that’s what I was doing when he found me.

Erek King

Erek the Chee.

Erek the fucking traitor.

He was still hot. The world is so unfair.

****

I don’t always sleep so well these days. Better than during the war, of course, back when sleep-deprivation was occasionally a way of life. Better than immediately after the war when my nerves were still fried and my brain hard-wired into combat/survival mode. I’d say I’ve got a eighty-five to ninety percent success rate at sleeping through the night, but that still leaves me awake and staring at the ceiling at least one night in ten.

Sometimes it’s worse, of course. Sometimes I actually get to sleep before the memories kick in and I wake up choking on the memories of blood, screaming for people who are alive and safe and very far away from me. Sometimes I can’t wake up. One night in a hundred I’ll know what’s happening, know what I’m going to be forced to relive, and be completely unable to pull myself out of it, trapped, unmoving and straining to pull breath into my lungs, while the worst horrors my mind can conceive of creep closer.

This wasn’t one of those nights, which is probably for the best. I’m never easy to talk to after one of those nights. Things might have gone… worse.

There’s a laugh. Like things went all that great as they were.

No, it wasn’t one of those nights. But it was still a bad one, and I’d woken up around two in the morning with bile in the back of my throat and my heart pounding against my ribcage. It hadn’t been the worst of my nightmares, something jumbled up and confusing, but not real. Not a memory. Just a bad dream.

The ones that had been memories first, those were the worst.

But I knew better than to think I’d be getting back to sleep, regardless. So I kicked back the silk sheets on my king-sized bed, padded across the plush carpet of my master suite, and dug a pair of Hugo Boss sweat pants out of my dresser. If I paused in the doorway to switch on the lights, well. You can’t really blame me.

All right, fine. I turned on every light in the house and had my phone and a baseball bat on the couch with me while I played _Metal Gear Solid_ and ate my weight in cold Chinese take-out. So sue me.

The point is, it had been a bad night. So when someone knocked on my front door, I almost jumped out of my skin.

And when I stumbled toward the door, muttering curses under my breath and vowing to fire my agent if he’d honestly thought showing up this late (early? Late.) was a good idea only to see Erek King standing on the other side of the door. Well.

I didn’t jump out of my skin. Let’s just leave it at that.

“Are you all right?” Erek asked. He leaned over slightly, just enough to peer around the edge of the door. I’d slammed it too hard, and instead of latching it had just bounced back open. “It sounded as if the door struck you-”

I manfully resisted rubbing my hip. I could already feel a bruise forming. “What are you doing here?” I asked. It wasn’t especially friendly, but whatever. Dude shows up at three in the morning, he doesn’t get to be picky about his reception. The only person who’d ever been able to get away with that kind of liberty was family and Animorphs, and even they had known better than to expect me to be sociable about it.

Shit. Animorphs. Jake. And Erek. And things I did not want to be thinking about at three in the morning or possibly ever again for 400, Alex.

“I came to see you,” Erek said. He straightened up and clasped his hands behind his back. He looked… unsure of himself. “I was going to wait until daylight, but then I saw your lights were on and I heard you yelling at the television,so-”

“ _What are you doing here?_ ” I asked again, and this time I wasn’t even the slightest bit friendly.

He paused, just for a moment, like he was considering his words carefully. I figured that was a smart move. “You’re leaving in three days. For the Hague.”

The word made my stomach queasy. “Congratulations. You’ve learned how to watch the evening news. Everyone on the planet knows that.”

Erek nodded, perhaps acknowledging my scathing tone, or, probably, just agreeing with me for the sake of avoiding an argument. “I want to go with you.”

My response was instant. “Are you on drugs?”

The look on Erek’s face indicated that he despaired of all humanity based solely on my example. It was kind of impressive considering it was just a hologram. “Can I come in?”

And see, what I was talking about before? With the bugs and the teeth? This was it. I was cruising along and WHAM. Horsefly in the face. But I could handle that. I could. It would have been rough and maybe my dreams would have an unpleasant Pool Ship vibe about them for a few days, but I could have done it if only he hadn’t asked.

I wanted to slam the door, but that hadn’t worked out so well for me last time. I wanted to scream in his face, but he’d just stare me down. I wanted- well.

There was the problem.

A year later, a war between us, and I still wanted.

****

Don’t fall in love with androids. One day I’m going to write a book on relationships and that will be my first piece of advice. And people will be all “But Marco, aren’t androids capable of human emotion and expressions of love?” and I’ll pick up my chair, hit them over the head with it, and shout “Don’t fall in love with androids!” until they stop asking stupid fucking questions.

Okay, I’m being melodramatic, I do that when I’m tired. Love is a big word, kind of scary-serious. Love is how I feel about my folks, and the other Animorphs and really not a whole lot of other people. Love is a big deal. I don’t know that I loved Erek, but there was some stupid part of me that had thought I could, once. A long time ago.

I let him in. Of course I did. I’m too big a glutton for punishment to tell him to come back in the morning, too practical to turn him away at all if he’s here to warn me about a threat, and too damn stupid to realize that he’d have run the odds on that before he ever knocked on the door.

“What’s so important about the Hague?” I asked. We were sitting in tense silence in the living room. The television was paused on a close-up of Solid Snake, and there was a half-eaten eggroll on the couch. Part of me thought I should probably clean up. Part of me wanted to take that eggroll and shove it in Erek’s face.

Park of me wanted to shove my tongue down Erek’s throat, but whatever.

“You will be testifying against Visser One,” Erek said.

“You’ve gotta stop stating the obvious, man. I’m barely refraining from calling the cops on you as it is. Do I need to ask you again?”

“I want to go,” Erek said. “I want to see the trial. I want-” He looked away. “They aren’t asking for a death-penalty.”

“Nope.” I sprawled back against the couch and offered him a thin smile and narrowed eyes. “It was considered. But the general consensus is that living in his tiny little prison in his shitty little body is a far worse hell than any death we could give him.”

He smiled. Not a happy smile, mind you. Rueful was the word that sprang to mind. “You’re trying to make me angry with you.”

“Yeah, so here’s the thing. I don’t give a shit if you’re angry with me.” I flopped a hand back and forth in mid-air. “I do sorta care about your state of mind in general, but only because I spent a lot of time after the war hoping you were crippled with guilt, so that factors in.”

“Crippled is not the right word,” he told me. “But if you want to hear that I carry guilt for my actions, I can assure you it is true.”

If I had thought, for even a minute, that he was feeling guilty for the things I thought he should feel guilty for… Maybe I was a jerk, trying to demand he feel what I wanted him to feel. “None of that explains why you want to go to the Hague.”

“A year ago, on the Pool Ship, I asked Cassie for a favor. She has not kept it.”

“The fucking nerve,” I said. “And after you go and get her best friend killed, too. How dare she.”

“I didn’t worry, at first. I thought the others would keep it for her. But Tobias left. And you left. And Ax is gone.” Erek looked out of place in my living room. He looked like combat and this was my safe haven. “I asked her to take care of Jake.”

“You have no right,” I said, and if I’d thought I was mad about the whole showing up in the middle of the night with no phone call thing, I was furious now. “No right at all to ask her for _anything_.”

“We were friends once,” he said softly. “The seven of us. I don’t forget that. No matter how our philosophies have driven us apart.”

That was as nice a way of putting it as you were going to get, I suppose. “Just talk.”

“There is a faction. Not pro-Yeerk, you understand. But… not entirely pro-Animorph, either.” His mouth turned down in a little frown. “One of them is a member of Visser One’s legal defense team.”

“Great, so one of the lawyers is a soulless jerk. Thanks. You can let yourself out any time.” I pushed myself up out of the chair with an impatient grunt. If that was all he’d come to say to me, then I’d eat my hat. No way Erek King condescended to socialize with a murderer like me without a damn good reason. But if he was going to be cryptic about it, I might as well go get a drink.

“Jake will be tried as a war criminal.”

I was across the room before I had the chance to think about it rationally. His shirt was clenched in my fist and my teeth ground against each other as I leaned in so close he had to be able to feel my breath on his face. “You go anywhere near him and I’ll put an end to you, so help me God.”

He didn’t even flinch, which wasn’t doing wonders for my ego. Hey, I’m a war hero. I can do scary, all right? “It’s not my doing. The faction I told you about feels that there is too much alien involvement in Earth’s affairs. They want to discredit the aliens in the eyes of humanity. And what better way than to strike down the man who forged the Andalite/Human alliance in the first place?”

I forced my fingers to uncurl and pushed him away. The spike of adrenaline made my heart beat too quickly, and up close he smelled like surgical steel. “And you care, why?”

“The Chee are alien to this world. If we ever do choose to reveal ourselves, a hostile humanity is not something we wish to face.” He didn’t bother to straighten his shirt. “And Jake doesn’t deserve that.”

“You didn’t feel that way a year ago.”

“I never felt that way,” Erek said, and something hard had worked it’s way into his voice. “You betrayed me, committed acts that I cannot condone or forgive, and you’d do it all again if you convinced yourself you had to. We couldn’t be friends after that, Marco. Don’t delude yourself. But that doesn’t mean that I think you – any of you – were the equal of the Yeerks. I despise what Jake did, not who he is.”

“If I wanted a lecture on the morality of war, I’d have called Cassie,” I said.

Erek looked away. “You never cared about the morality of it, Marco. You knew it was wrong and you did it anyway.”

“Whereas you just tried to take the choice away from us entirely,” I said. “Force us to live by your philosophy – though not for long, because your way would have literally guaranteed the death of the entire human race.”

He didn’t look back at me, but his shoulders sagged. Just a little. Part of me wanted to remember that we’d been friends and allies for a long time, and that part made my fingers twitch, as if to reach out to him.

I didn’t. But I kind of wanted to. Even still.

“We’ll never agree on this,” he said finally. “I didn’t come here to fight. For whatever it is worth to you, I don’t hate you or any of the others, Marco. I wish life had been kinder to all of you. I wish…” He looked at me then, and the hologram looked like everything my horny sixteen-year-old self had ever wanted. “I wish I could have shown you an easier path.”

“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing hard,” I said. What a goddamn philosophy for a guy who liked being comfortable as much as I did. “What are they going to do to Jake?”

He told me. It wasn’t a complicated plan. Question him on the stand, get him to admit to some pretty horrible things – all of them true, all of them things that still haunted him – and then push to discredit his testimony. Who would take the word of a war criminal, after all?

It wouldn’t work. One phone call would make sure that the prosecution knew what to expect. And Jake wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t as smart as I was, of course, but he wasn’t stupid, and he had learned how to smell a trap from a mile away. And if he didn’t, I’d figure something out.

“All right,” I said when Erek was done. “I’ll take care of it. You can go now.”

He hesitated. He didn’t look much older than the last time I’d seen him, I realized. It felt like a lifetime, but it had been less than a year. He looked like a seventeen-year-old in need of a haircut, and if my mind thought we should both be a hundred and ten, well. PTSD will do that to you.

“You’re right,” he said. “I had no right to ask Cassie for anything. And I have no right to ask you-”

I cut him off. “Jake is not your problem. You don’t get to will his care to me like some kind of absent godfather.”

He blinked, and then the corners of his eyes crinkled a little. A smile. Not a big one, but a genuine one. “I know. I meant you. Take care of Marco, all right?” The smile wavered a little and was gone, replaced by something impersonal and professional. “He was my friend once. He deserves to be happy again.”

And like that I could see it. Erek’s real reason for being there. The real reason he’d tracked me down across the country and knocked on my door in the middle of the night.

It wasn’t like getting hit in the face with bugs this time. More like that feeling when you’re driving too fast and you hit a small incline. The drop in your stomach.

“Marco’s gonna be fine,” I said.

The smile he gave me was bigger this time, and gone just as fast. “We could have been… good friends. You and I.”

“We were good friends,” I said. “That’s worth something.”

He turned away, back toward the door I’d attempted to slam in his face less than an hour ago.

Erek was an android. He could think and feel. I don’t know if he could dream. But I knew his nights were just as rough as mine. His memories just as painful. Worse, maybe, because I’d had the comfort of believing I’d done what was necessary while he’d never be able to reconcile loss of life with his core programming. And I’d had my team, and my family, while Erek’s actions had made him a permanent outsider; a reformed killer in a race of pacifists.

The warning about the Hague was probably legit. But he could have called. He could have emailed. He could have come during the damn day.

“Take care of Erek,” I said right before the door closed. “He was a good friend of mine. I hope he’s happy.”


End file.
